Photo/Illutration Mikhail Gorbachev speaks during an interview in Moscow in December 2019. (Asahi Shimbun file photo)

A politician tore down a wall of confrontation that divided the world into two camps.

He believed that there is a way for countries and regions with different racial and cultural backgrounds to coexist peacefully.

That politician was Mikhail Gorbachev, the last Soviet leader who helped bring an end to the Cold War.

Had he not made the decisions he made, the world today would look completely different.

His bold reform programs changed the Soviet Union’s policies on the domestic and diplomatic fronts.

He launched perestroika (restructuring) during the mid-1980s to reinvent the country’s socialist system. He also pursued the “new thinking” foreign policy to expand dialogue with the West.

As he allowed Eastern European countries under the Soviet control freedom of politics and speech, the communist regimes in these countries tumbled like dominoes.

His decision to allow the German reunification surprised the world.

The goal of “Common European Home,” espoused by Gorbachev, was underpinned by universal values that transcend political systems.

He believed that the world could share the principle that human lives and dignity should be protected everywhere equally.

The Soviet Union collapsed with a relatively small loss of human lives in light of the country’s history of cold-blooded purges and oppression.

This has been credited to the desire of its leader to avoid bloodshed.

Gorbachev was viewed by many as a naive idealist. In today’s Russia, his name is generally mentioned in the context of a national disgrace.

Indeed, it is unclear how well he was prepared for the profound sense of confusion and loss that would be felt by the people if they faced a radical change of social order.

But he remained faithful to his political creed because he was driven by a sense of crisis solidly based on the reality.

The 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster made him keenly aware of how nuclear warfare would cause human catastrophe and prompted him to hold nuclear arms reduction talks with the United States.

Gorbachev set out on an ambitious quest to persuade the world to pursue a future of rational coexistence based on a faith in human reason, instead of seeking military supremacy driven by ideological conflict.

His undertaking was a grand experiment that left a tremendous mark on modern history.

There is no consensus view yet with regard to the consequences of that experiment.

Russian President Vladimir Putin once talked about pursuing democratic development of Russia as part of Western Europe.

One factor behind Putin’s switch to autocratic rule was probably the arrogance of the United States and Europe, which regarded themselves as the victors in the Cold War and behaved accordingly.

Even so, Putin’s all-out efforts to reverse the wheel of history are simply against all reason.

He has denied Western liberalism, started aggression against a neighbor driven by his own world view and shown callous disregard for human lives.

Lessons of history would be lost if the Western bloc led by the United States and Europe responds to Russia’s outrageous behavior by returning to a strategy to enhance its supremacy that would again divide the world.

Now is the time for the world to use its collective imagination to recall the fact that confrontation could lead to the catastrophe of nuclear war.

Gorbachev is gone. But the implications of the experiment he embarked on are more weighty and relevant than ever.

--The Asahi Shimbun, Sept. 1

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